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Struggling to provide water to rice farms along the lower Colorado River, LCRA has started pumping water out of the river to fill two abandoned gravel pits in Colorado County in an effort to develop new methods of providing water for rice irrigation.

Feeling the pressure of greater water demands from growing cities like Austin in recent years, LCRA has also been taxed by the growing demands of agriculture and other industries along the river.

Following last year’s drought, the water authority was forced to reduce the amounts rice farmers could pull from the river, according to LCRA Information Officer Clara Tuma. The reduced water available for irrigation has caused an estimated 60-precent drop in rice production this year.

“Providing water to all of our customers is challenging especially in a dry year,” she said. “This pilot project is collecting water from the natural flow of the river, thanks to winter and early spring rains. A prescribed amount of this water will fill the pits and be used for agricultural irrigation,” she said.

Two locations

Ryan Rowney, LCRA’s manager of water operations, says the gravel pits, pre-existing but no longer in use, are 100 acres and 40 acres respectively and located adjacent to pre-existing irrigation canals in the Garwood irrigation district. Temporary pumps were in operation Friday, May 4.

“We have been negotiating contracts for about six months, tying down the details of how this would work. It’s important to remember that this water does not represent a release from the dams on the Highland Lakes, but is natural flow of the river. If we didn’t catch this water, it would flow by and into the Gulf [of Mexico],” he said.

While winter and early spring rains have helped increase the flow in the Colorado, Rowney says last month was the sixth driest April on record, so the demand for irrigation is going to rise.

“We will be testing the ability of these gravel pits to provide water for agriculture use throughout the course of the summer, and we hope to add more gravel pits to the chain. At the end of the growing season we will evaluate how effective they were in providing additional water for irrigation and hopefully will be expanding on the project,” he added.

Rowney says the idea of using gravel pits to catch water for agricultural irrigation was a collective project of a number of LCRA personnel.

Discuss this Article 1

Water is an essential resource in our daily lives as an individual for survival. Water is also utilized in many of other activities including for commercial purposes. Therefore, having the water pilot program will definitely be highly beneficial for the agricultural farmers and also the end consumers who consume the rice at the end of the food chain. Water storage is one good platform to contain water and limit its consumption to prevent excessive usage.